1. The Problem of Religion in Theology (extended note, part 3)
To recap: Barth understands religion not as the problem of theology, but as a problem. He passionately argues against apprehending God’s Word as the revelation of religion instead of (properly) the religion of revelation, which brings a word of grace and judgment on all human works and words, including those of religion. In order to ground his argument historically, Barth will undertake a detailed survey of the concept of religion in Christian theology from Thomas Aquinas. This is the main body of this long note in Church Dogmatics I.2.17, and his survey spans pages 284-290.
One might suppose that such a survey could be an important task for a university seminar –it certainly has a feel of work pieced out to graduate students who bring the results of their research to the seminar table. Few Dogmatics seminar participants or Historical Theology seminar participants would be competent to judge all these research results, and certainly neither am I. Therefore I will not try the reader’s patience or credulity by examining each author in turn.
Barth begins with Thomas, ST II.2.qu.81 et seq. and describes the “monkish” religio in terms reminiscent of de Lagarde’s phrase (cf. previous entry). Thomas “had obviously no thought of a non-Christian ‘religion.'” (I/2/284) This claim is now regarded as inaccurate in two ways: Thomas (consciously or otherwise) drew on Al-Fārābī and Averroes (Ibn Rushd) and thinking drawn from Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed which is well situated in Islamic philosophical traditions ; and 2) Thomas argued against the Prophet (Muhammed) in Summa Contra Gentiles I.16.4. note 1 et seq.
Without question Thomas’ did not regard Islam was true religio (neither as “a true religio“) comparable to philosophia Christiana, and Barth can reasonably conclude that “what we call (religio) seems then not to have been known by that name.”(I/2/284) Seems is an important word: Thomas’ thought world is very different from Barth’s, and concepts are not readily and totally comparable. Christian thinking as regards any religio other than itself (leaving aside Judaism, Christianity’s parent and a relationship fraught with anxiety, projection, and violence) was stimulated by the rise of Islam.
It is striking that Barth moves from Thomas directly to Calvin, which completely elides the momentous centuries from 1073 to the 1260s and the numerous Crusades or Crusade-like events that have complicated Christian-Islamic conversations since. Thomas reflected on the Crusades very little, and by moving directly to Calvin Barth ignores the significant and complicated anxieties of influence in the ca. 250 intervening years. This will not be the only instance of the startling distance of this historical theology in the service of dogmatics, from human events and reflections which deeply influenced such theology’s context.
Barth must admit at the outside that the term religio figures prominently in the very title of Calvin’s magnum opus (Institutio Christianae Religionis). And Calvin speaks “after the humanistic fashion.” (I/2/284) Calvin certainly did not use the word to denote “something human in a neutral and universal sense” (anachronistically , e.g. in a 18th-century sense). As Barth reads Calvin, for Calvin “religio in an entity x” which in Christianity receives content only when taken up and fashioned by revelation.(I/2/285)
It is noteworthy that Barth never mentions Luther in this connection (although he does mention Gneiso-Lutherans such as Gerhard, and Lutheran high orthodoxy, such as Calov [a.k.a. Kalau], follows much further below.) Why? Barth never indicates any reason. Could it be because Luther wrote some very hostile and even violent things about Jews and “Turks” (i.e. Muslims), and in Barth’s context such language was far too close to the Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda already flooding public discourse? Or because of the German Christians (i.e, Nazi Christians) co-opted Luther in their fascist discourse? In any case, Luther was far more concerned about the incursion of the Turks into Europe than was Calvin, and from that experience had to acknowledge a practically significant form of religion profoundly differing from Christianity, even while he called it heretical and false.
In any case, Barth embarks upon an intricate examination of Protestant theologians (Lutheran and Reformed, but especially the latter) throughout the balance of the 16th century, and the 17th. Barth credits (or blames) Johannes Wollebius ( 1589-1629) with the first “general and neutral definition of religion,” taken up a pupil of Wollebius’ older contemporary Amandus Polanus (1561-1610) named Anton Walaeus (1573-1639) for apologetic reasons, “in the context of arguments for the authenticity of Holy Scripture against atheists on the one hand and Papists on the other.” (I/2/285) Barth continues, “But once introduced how long will it have ‘only’ apologetic importance?”(ibid.) For Calvin the one real argument for the authenticity of Scripture is the testimonium Spiritus sanctus internum, but on the contrary with Walaeus the argument rests upon a general concept of religion known to us by conscience and nature.(I/2/286) For Barth, in the next generation Abraham Heidanus (1597-1678) began to import a Cartesian sense of neutral knowing, taken further by Marcus Friedrich Wendelin (1584-1652). Barth then traces similar steps among Lutherans.
All these (and others) prepared for the “catastrophe” (I/2/287) from which Neo-Protestantism was truly born, in the writing of Salomon van Til (1643-1713) and the Lutheran J. Franz Buddeaus (1667-1729). In van Til dogmatics begins with a theologia naturalis presupposing “the concept and the description of a general and natural and neutral ‘religion,’ which as religio in se spectata is the presupposition of all religions.” (I/2/288). After a long and dense argument Barth concludes the historical consequences:
Human religion, the relationship with God which we can and actually do have apart from revelation, is not an unknown but a very well-known quantity both in form and content, and as such it is something which has to be reckoned with, as having a central importance for all theological thinking. It constitutes, in fact, the presupposition, the criterion, the necessary framework for an understanding of revelation. It shows us the question which is answered by revealed religion . . . and it is as the most satisfactory answer that the Christian religion has the advantage over others and is rightly described as revealed religion. (I/2/289)
Barth will go on to trace the consequences of this crucial and fatal turn –to be continued in the next blog entry.
Rev. and page numbers corrected, April 2020